Giovane ragazza sul divano

In the summer of 1893 Berthe Morisot borrowed a model from her old friend Auguste Renoir and set her down on an Empire daybed. She painted the girl several times over, from different angles, and this is one of those sessions. A young woman in a green dress reclines, a large blue vase behind her, everything caught in long strokes of pale, chalky colour that keep the whole scene faintly weightless. Morisot was in her early fifties and near the end. She would die less than two years later, in 1895, of pneumonia caught while nursing her daughter through an illness. This canvas travelled a long way from her Paris studio. It now hangs on the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, given to a museum there by the brother of the dealer Ambroise Vollard.